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601. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Sometimes I worry myself. Last week I was flying through O’Hare airport. I had a fairly long lay over (and isn’t THAT an interesting term!). I was tired. It was dark outside; in airports during the winter 6:00pm and midnight feel like the same thing, just as in old age homes prunes and iced tea taste the same. It’s odd. So, it was midnight or something. My eyes were fried so I couldn’t read. Besides, I was the kind of tired that, if I lay down during my lay over, I’d wake up and my flight would have left me behind. So I was walking and looking at stuff.

Here’s the part that worries me: I saw a sandwich. I wasn’t hungry but I knew my flight was approximately 5 hours long and I could imagine myself getting hungry before the plane landed. And what if the plane never landed? I should have a sandwich. Here’s more of the part that worries me: at the Airport Fresh food stand, where nothing is really fresh, where I saw the sandwich, the sandwich I saw, the sandwich I chose was sitting all alone. There were others further down the shelf, but this one, this lonely little sandwich, sat all alone. It was too small to compete. The other sandwiches were muscly things wrapped tightly in plastic; they were bursting to get out of their wrappers. My sandwich was the runt of the litter, sliced chicken breast with red bell pepper. It was destined to be an engineer. And since no one was talking to it, since it had been abandoned by the in-crowd, I bought it.

As I walked away from Airport Fresh, I had a realization: I am Charlie Brown! My ghost costume has too many holes! On this day of All Hallows Eve I will get rocks instead of candy in my plastic pumpkin head trick-or-treat candy bucket because I projected a story (my story?) on a lonely sub-standard sandwich that a host of other discerning travelers were wise enough to leave behind. I chose the Christmas tree with few branches and no needles because I thought it needed a home. Or, an alternate narrative: mainstream sandwiches bore me and I am much more interested in the deviants in society. More projection perhaps but one with a healthier turn: I chose that narrative.

After all of that, I will not tell you what horrors I suffered when I actually got hungry on my flight. That sandwich pleaded with me for a long time and I had to explain that it had a purpose to fulfill. And, as difficult as the path might seem now, it would thank me later. It went quietly. So I think – all in all – it was a very worrisome affair. Spooky even. Ghoulish when you consider what happened to that poor lonely sandwich.

600. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Don Miguel Ruiz’s 4th Agreement is: Be impeccable to your word. Say what you mean and mean what you say. What was most striking to me, most curious, the first time I read The Four Agreements, was the connection Don Miguel Ruiz makes between being impeccable to your word and self-love; he writes that being impeccable to your word is the most self-loving thing you can do.

I think and write often about the power of language. What we think is what we create. The labels we assign to people and experiences are more potent than we know. Our language is not passive. And, it is another step beyond the notion of language as powerful to language as self-love. How can being impeccable to your word be the most self-loving thing that you can do?

For some reason, this question was on my mind during my late night flight from Chicago to Seattle. I was too tired to read. The flight was not full so I had plenty of space, empty seats all around me. I let my mind roll around language and self-love. When you love yourself you have no need to hide, to manipulate, to justify, to deflect, or judge or diminish. You have no need to change the thinking of another person. That is not yours to do. You no longer have any need to control what others might or might not see, might or might not think. What they perceive is none of your business. Your business is to attend to what you perceive. And, what if your perception was rooted in the absolute love of self? What would you perceive? What would you say? What would you no longer need to say?

599. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

The orca came to the end of my street today. Two pods! Or, at least that is what the excited onlookers claimed. There is an organization that follows the movements of the whales and they’d arrived with a sack of binoculars. People generously shared the binoculars and took great delight in pointing to others the location of the whales; the customary tides of not-talking-to-strangers were momentarily reversed: the crowd beckoned to passers-by. Unsuspecting dog walkers were surrounded by excited orca watchers; “You’ve got to see this!” they exclaimed.

As I stood there looking at the people look at the whales, I couldn’t help but wonder if the orca knew what they do to us. Do they know that a simple swim-by jolts us into simple presence; we not only see them but we are suddenly capable of seeing each other. I imagined the orca woke up this morning, stretched, had some coffee and discussed which human pod needed an intervention. It was our good fortune that today they chose the pods in and around Elliot Bay.

Last night at a dinner party we talked about how difficult it is for Americans to discuss complex topics. A professor of law told us that his conservative students never share their opinions for fear of being ridiculed. He said they are hooted out of class if they share an unpopular belief. We claim territory too soon. We fight. We choose sides and argue for our point of view, skipping over the part where we listen to each other, the part where we offer each other the grace of difference.

The orca must have heard our conversation last night. They must be listening to our political non-conversation. I hope they are scheming about how to reach the inland human pods. It is a joy to see what a little orca intervention can do.

598. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

In preparation for our class I was reading Alan’s book, Create A World That Works, and read a passage that I’ve read at least five times but never before registered. This time, it was the passage that stood out, the passage that stood up and said, “Hey!” The chapter is about stillness and the passage that hollered is a kind of equation that goes something like this: the more inner chatter you experience, the more you will try to control your outside world. Or, flip it over: quiet your mind and you will quiet your need to control things that you can’t control.

The inner world and the outer world are not separate affairs. One of the Hermetic Laws is, “As within, so without” and I understood the concept in story terms: quiet the racket inside and you will not live a life of racket on the outside. Yet, I hadn’t understood it in terms of the impulse to control. It makes sense to me: a life full of racket is a life full of the frustrated attempt to control things that you can’t control – which feeds the internal racket. It is a feedback loop.

I worked with a group this week and we played with the concept of “controlling what you can control and letting the rest go” – as it applies to personal and organizational health. A healthy person, a healthy organization is not invested in things beyond their control. They focus their energy and action where it is most effective. They are not invested in what other people think or see or feel; those things are beyond their control. They are invested in and responsible for what they think or see or feel. Their worth is in their own hands and not in the hands of others. Inner chatter, what you think, is a controllable. Every meditation and self-help book on the planet has clues about how to quiet the inner chatter. Add this to the pile: let go of what you can’t control, care more for what you think than you care about what others think. Chatter is a pattern and so it quiet; it is simply a matter of the practice you choose.

597. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Sitting on the pier watching the sun come up, the temperature already 85 degrees, I had an epiphany. I realized that I have spent much of my life trying “to figure it out,” which, in essence, is an attempt to figure out myself. Watching the sky erupt into orange and fiery red, I thought, “What if I am mystery? What if I was meant to be a mystery? What if all of this “figuring out” was really an attempt to control or contain the uncontrollable? How would I be in the world if I stopped trying to figure it out and instead reveled in the mystery? I think I’d play more than I do currently. I’d run in circles and roll down hills. I’d be less concerned about things making sense.

I know this. I give meaning to the world I inhabit. The meaning is not “in” the world; it is “in” me. The perpetual search for meaning stopped when I ceased to seek meaning as something separate from myself. This shift of perspective is a quality of empowerment: we become power-full when we own our choices and the epicenter of choice is where we decide to place our focus. In other words, what do you choose to see and how do you choose to interpret (story) your experiences.

Even knowing this, it came as a surprise when I recognized the need to surrender my control and containment imperative: figuring it out is a fool’s errand. We can discover how to split an atom but we will never discover what it means. It means nothing without our participation, how we use it, what we intend. With that sunrise, the world regained its scope and infinite variety. My assumptions dribbled away with the dawn. The truth is that I don’t know. I don’t really know anything. It is too vast for me to know. The best I can do is close my eyes and feel the sun on my face. I can smell the salt sea air, I can listen to the waves and the birds and the distant voices. I can make a story of it all. Ask me what it means and I will ask you what it means to you. Ask me what it means to me and I just might tell you, “Nobody knows! It’s a mystery.”

596. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Lately, I have this image of myself that makes me laugh. I see it in sleep, sometimes while daydreaming, and today I found myself doodling it. It is as surprising as it is welcome. It is one of those images that I did not manufacture; rather it came to me. I see it so often now that I re-run it, enjoy it; I am playing with it.

It is as if I am seeing a film running in reverse, like a jalopy losing pieces all over the road, when seen in reverse, the pieces fly back together. That is the image. I am standing very still in a meadow and all of my pieces are flying back together. I did not realize I’d lost so much along the way!

I giggle when I see this image. Rather, this image is visceral and it tickles – all of those pieces coming together delight me and literally tickle me.

Because inquiring minds want to know and I have one of those inquiring minds, I’ve tried to identify the pieces; I want to know what I dropped on the highway of life. Yet, the moment I pay attention to the individual pieces I lose the image. The tickling stops, the image dissipates. Apparently I am not meant to focus on the fragments; it is the whole that matters.

In class today we talked about the verb “to heal.” It has roots in an old English word, hælen, which meant, “to make whole.” To heal is to make whole. As I close my eyes and see myself standing in the meadow, all of my pieces flying back together, I giggle, arms extended and say to myself, “Welcome home.”

595. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

[Continued from 594]

It is a full decade since I learned to dive with Terry. Until last week it had been 6 years since my last dive. Although I live on the Puget Sound, near one of the world’s great dive spots, the water is cold and I am skinny; I hate to shiver and all I need do is look at the divers preparing to enter the frigid waters outside my door and I start looking for a blanket.

A few weeks ago I flew to Belize for a dive vacation. Apparently I was ready for my second master and the next level of the lesson. And, lucky me, since it was time for the second master, I actually had two masters show up: the first was the dive master, named Luckie (note: I am considering a name change; how cool is it to be a dive master AND to be named Luckie). Luckie, above the water, is a trickster and filled with laughter; beneath the surface he is easy, clear, and neutral. He radiates trust. I would follow him anywhere. Luckie dives without any weight. Most divers need a small amount of weight to take them down and to assist with neutral buoyancy. This is too big of a metaphor for this small post but just consider the implications: how much weight do you need to carry to become neutral? Luckie needs none. He is neutral all the time and like Terry, that does not render him without personality, it does the exact opposite: Luckie is a riot of laughter and joy. He is a magnet for life. He is hungry to know and engage and experience. He is the embodiment of what it is to be neutral and efficient. Luckie has fire and he burns clean.

The second master is Luckie’s boss, Declan (okay, another cool name. Apparently you can only live in Belize if your have a cool name). He came with us on our second day of diving. The first time I saw Declan in the water I almost cried; I have never before seen a human being that easy and present. He was so…beautiful…in the water that I was stunned: the absence of struggle. I had to swim behind him. I wanted to know what he knows, I wanted to mimic what he did. And, remember, I know Terry. I was amazed and inspired by Luckie. Declan in the water becomes the water; he is not easy in it, he is it. He teaches a class in mastering your buoyancy and I will go back to Belize to take the class. Like Terry or Luckie, diving with Declan is not about diving; it is about how to be in the world; it is how to be the world.

I told him that I wanted to take his class and he said, “Oh, it’s easy! It’s not the same for any two people. It’s all about the right amount of weight and recognizing that balance comes from your hips. Find your pivot point, it’s in your center and feel your way into it and then practice. There’s no other way.”

So, crib notes from Belize: you can’t think your way into it. Neutral knows how to laugh. I now know what the absence of struggle looks like. Embodiment. Perfect balance. Practice, practice, practice. There’s no other way.